Love is Wanting the Same Kind of Relationship

I suppose that everyone who goes through a divorce ponders in their own mind, “What went wrong?”  For years leading up to my divorce I always assumed my failing relationship was my fault, that I wasn’t trying hard enough.  And so I tried harder.  But since the divorce, through all my reading, studying, and pondering of the “why,” I have come to believe, or at least suspect, that we didn’t even want the same kind of relationship.  I wanted a deeply emotional relationship, such as what I have talked about this month (and every February since I began this blog).  I think he was satisfied with a very superficial relationship, one more like a business agreement.  All too often my attempts to connect with him on a deeper level were met with dismissal, if not derision.  If he were asked, he would probably insist he was a very good husband, and I suppose by his definition and standard he was.  Yet I was starving for more than he was willing to give, wanting an entirely different kind of relationship.  While I was trying very hard to be the kind of wife I envisioned in the type of relationship I wanted, he expected the kind of wife he envisioned in the type of relationship he wanted.  And they were two very different things.  Although by my standard I was a very good wife, by his standard I failed miserably, he even told me so.  Yet when people are courting, and they talk about how many children they want, what kind of house they want… they don’t really talk about what kind of relationship they want.  They seem to think that it will somehow fall into an agreeable place on its own.  If you ask me, it is one of the most important topics for discussion.